Companies can have business processes, where each business process requires that a set of tasks be completed before the business process can be deemed to be completed. An example of a business process is a financial close process, which is a process to complete an accounting reporting cycle of a company. The financial close process can include one or more tasks that need to be performed in order to complete the accounting reporting cycle. Such tasks can include ledger and sub-ledger close, data loading and mapping, financial consolidation, reconciliation, tax/treasury, and internal/external reporting tasks.
A computer system can be configured to manage one or more business processes, such as a financial close process, for a company. However, there are many challenges in configuring a computer system to manage business processes. One challenge is the wide diversity of business processes. For example, in the context of a financial close process, a financial close can mean different things to different employees of a company. To a divisional controller, a financial close may mean closing out the sub-ledgers and general ledger at month end or quarter end and submitting the results to a corporate branch of the company. To a headquarters accountant, the financial close may mean collecting the details from the respective divisions of the company, making final adjustments, and performing the corporate financial consolidation and reporting. To a Chief Financial Officer and other financial executives, the financial close may mean finalizing results, announcing earnings, and creating 10Q/10K's and other regulatory filings for the SEC and other stakeholders. Thus, it is desirable to a company that the computer system configured to manage such diverse business processes, and the diverse tasks associated with a business process, provide a flexible and robust mechanism for creating, grouping, and managing tasks of one or more business processes.
Furthermore, a computer system configured to manage one or more business processes may need to interact with one or more external computer systems. For example, a computer system configured to manage a financial close process may need to interact with external computer systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and financial consolidation systems. An ERP system is a computer system configured to manage internal and external resources such as tangible assets, financial resources, materials and human resources. A financial consolidation system is a computer system configured to streamline the internal financial reporting of a company. However, the ERP and financial consolidation systems may be independent systems that are separate from the computer system configured to manage the financial close process. The independent nature of the systems may make integration and coordination of the systems difficult.
One approach for overcoming these difficulties is to use several ad-hoc and disconnected tools to interconnect the ERP systems and financial consolidation systems with the computer system configured to manage the financial close process, in order to complete associated tasks, such as creating external-facing financial statements. One problem with this approach is that there is no visibility into the activities necessary to create the financial statements. Activities performed outside the ERP systems or financial consolidation systems often do not have a system of record. Thus, the tasks performed are difficult to audit, and, as a result, a risk is associated with the goal of achieving accurate financial statements.